


How to properly drown your sorrows

by cuneifire



Category: Hamilton - Miranda
Genre: Death, Grief/Mourning, I Wrote This Instead of Sleeping, Letters, M/M, Why Did I Write This?
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-07-09
Updated: 2018-07-09
Packaged: 2019-06-07 17:42:57
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,574
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15224411
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuneifire/pseuds/cuneifire
Summary: Laurens dies. Alexander (sort of) copes.





	How to properly drown your sorrows

**Author's Note:**

> this fic has been haunting me since may so voila. also it was written from 1-4 o'clock in an airport in peru whilst waiting for a flight. don't worry, there was much editing involved.

The news hits him like a stack of bricks, a shot to the head, a gunfire to the sky.

                “ _On Tuesday the twenty seventh, John Laurens was…”_

                The room is cold, he thinks weakly. He’s cold. He should really do something about that.

Eliza continues, stopping with a brief pause at the words, before swallowing and continuing.

                “ _These soldiers were not yet informed of the British surrender at Yorktown”_ She says, and he feels her concerned gaze catch on him as she continues.

Eliza’s voice fades out from the room, and he’s suddenly left, standing _,_ helpless, caught in a memory.

                “ _I may not live to see our glory. But I will gladly join the fight. And when our children tell our story-” Here Alexander had paused, looking around at his table of newly found revolutionary friends, gaze lingering. Lafayette smiled with some tossed in French that Alex guessed would be incomprehensible even to a Frenchman. Hercules grinned, lifting his mug up for another swig of the watered down beer._

_“They’ll tell the story of tonight.”_

_“Let’s have another round tonight.” The suggestion was met with repetitions and agreeing murmurs._

_“Raise a glass to freedom, something they can never take away. No matter what they tell you.” Laurens had stood up, raising his glass and smiling too, and his smile was different from that of Lafayette and Hercules’, the curve of his lips more subtle, the way he tilted his head more as more a statement of fondness than a proclamation of anything._

_“Raise a glass to the four of us, tomorrow there’ll be more of us, telling the story of tonight.” He clinked his glass, and Alexander realized why his smile, Laurens’ smile, was special._

_Because it was directed at him, because that fondness in his eyes was for Alexander and not the others, for_ him, _and the four of them pulled out of the table to leave the bar and Laurens’ hand just brushed his and-_

_No._

No.

                “As you know, Laurens was in the process of assembling the first black battalion. The members of the regiment have been dispersed and returned to their masters.”

“-Alexander, are you alright?” His wife asks him, obvious concern in her eyes. He shuts his briefly, only for a second, just long enough to _see_ him, see Laurens on the field, taking the duel for him, promising not to throw away his shot.

                Laurens, promptly-

He looks at his wife, lips parted, hand on his shoulder, awaiting his respond with her seemingly never ending patience. But he cannot give it to her, not tonight, not now. Because the answer to her question would be no.

So he pauses, before pushing past her.

                “I have so much work to do.” He says, because he does, because he cannot let himself become so obviously distraught and distracted.

.

The moon outside hangs high in the sky, bright and hurting his eyes. The candle is at the end of its stub now, wax pooling into the metal holder which he placed it in.

                His papers are strewn over his desk in a complicated organization that he can only hope he will actually be able to understand in the morning, a frustrating contras to its usual neat stack. The paper he is working on, _On the politics and treasury of the national bank of the United States of America_ , is more filled with scribbles and inapplicable notes than anything of use.

His hands twitch. He knows, to his very core, that he wants to, _needs_ to write.

                But he stares down at his paper, arguments on statistics and figures and numbers, and he can’t focus.

His eyes wander to a spare piece of paper, haphazardly thrown (no, purposefully placed, he’s sure there was _something_ he was planning to do with it, it wasn’t there for no reason) at the edge of his desk, fraying and slightly burned from the heat of the nearby melting candle.

                On a whim he did not know he had, he grabs it.

_Laurens,_

He starts, and then scribbles it out.

_To John Laurens, the newly deceased,_

He tries out, but the title makes him feel insane for even trying this, so he crosses it out.

_To John Laurens, son of Henry-_

He crosses that one out immediately.

After multiple repetitions of titles and terms that serve perfectly well their purpose but fail to sit on the paper in the way Alexander knows they should, he finally gets it.

_To John Laurens, my friend._

It’s not perfect, but it works.

                He picks up his quill with renewed vigor, and finally begins putting pen to paper.

.

The next morning, he wakes up early, rubbing the sleep out of his eyes with a bit to his lips, gritting his teeth as he gets up to look over the papers he had written last night.

                _In defense of the US Constitu…_ the writing tapers out to unreadable there, a mess of illegible scribbles incapable of being derived as anything other than mumbling, plotting, sorrowful nonsense. He’d attempted to write essays as the night set in, but it was a mess.

He throws the papers out. Even if his writing was legible, the ink was too blurred.

He goes through tens of scribbled out papers and puts them in the trash, thinking maybe to burn them tomorrow, with how shameful they are. It’s the mumbles of a grief addled mind, he tells himself. He’ll be fine in the future.

                _The future, the future, always look to the future-_

He pulls off another paper, rambling about god-knows-what, accidentally knocking down the burned out candle. He chucks out the useless candle, prying it from the golden holder it sits in so that it can be used again.

                Part of him thinks he’s doing that to avoid the paper below the damned candle holder.

Just like all his other papers of the previous night, this one is messed with n scribbles and messy ink splotches, scratched out words lining the paper with things he thought but couldn’t make sense of. It is unlike even the other texts he attempted to write last night, the writing less legible, the thoughts more rambling, too obviously personal.

                Alexander shakes his head at the paper, suppressing a headache, barely remembering the words he’d written down the previous night in his sleep deprived stupor.

He pulls up the paper full of late night ramblings, and begins to read.

_To John Laurens, my friend._

_You have passed. It is not a question now; it is a statement. A sorrowful statement at that, one that I regret to say as truth._

_I cannot say I know the precise circumstances of your death, but they have told me you died bravely on the battlefield, and I hope you know most believe there is nothing more honorable than dying for what one believes in. I can only wish your sacrifice had granted those men the freedom they so valiantly fought for._

_I,_ -Here, Alexander had paused. He remembered that, ink hanging precariously over the paper as he contemplated the words he had been near saying.

 _I feel as though your leaving marks something important_ was one of them, but that was too vague. _The world has been made worse from you parting of it_ said too much, said too much of _him_ and not of the man he was speaking of, and that, he had decided then and there, was not the purpose of the letter. _There is a hole in my heart where your presence would usually be_ had only briefly flitted by before he had frozen up, the pen almost dropped and spilled ink all over the otherwise unmarred paper.

                He bit his lip, pushing those thoughts away to where they belonged. _Unnatural,_ a voice in his head hiss. _Wrong-_ It persisted, and he agreed with it.

He swallows, and returns to reading the letter he had written.

                His handwriting was messier than usual, he noted.

_I was once told by a great man that dying is easy, and that living is harder._

_I cannot attest to that, seeing as I have not yet joined you, but life seems quite –_ He had paused again here, searching for the proper word, a word he just couldn’t seem to find.

 _-Inane without you._   

 _Inane_ was the wrong word, but _empty_ sounded too much like a prophecy and _unfulfilled_ almost terrified him at what the lecherous, sleep deprived part of his brain could pull up from under tired thoughts.

_I hope to see you on the other side._

                _Yours truly,_

_Alexander Hamilton._

.

He does not know why, but he keeps writing letters. On days where he cannot write of politics and banks, he writes to people, mostly the living, but then again, Laurens had always been the exception.            

                He keeps them in a cabinet only he knows of, at the back of his desk and almost indistinguishable from the study wood of the cabinet, where he knows no one will find them, where history cannot touch them.

He writes, like he always does, without consideration of the possible consequences. And some days, on particularly bad nights, words will slip, words that come off less friendly than they should. Alexander considers, _tries_ to burn those letters, hand poised above the candle to burn, but he won’t, he _can’t._

They are how he properly drowns his sorrows, his only consolation.

                It is hard to throw that out. 

**Author's Note:**

> ( i haven't been into hamilton for forever so i didn't really re read it before posting. and im not a hardcore fan so i'm sorry if some minor details are off.)
> 
> hope you enjoyed/ feedback is always appreciated!


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